Obama’s Contraception Coverage

February 25, 2012

Recently, the Obama administration declared that all employers, including Catholic institutions, will be required to offer free insurance coverage for birth control to their employees. In the weeks since the declaration, the controversy that it stirred up caused the administration to revise its decision, putting in place “accommodations” by which it hopes to quell the furor.

The accommodations, however, do not really address the objection that the Conference of Catholic Bishops, among other groups, has raised to the mandate. For one thing, self-insuring organizations, such as many Catholic dioceses, would still probably be required to fund birth control directly. For another, employers who buy group insurance, by their purchase of plans which themselves are required to cover birth control, would still be financially supporting their employees’ access to it. In a recent piece, Washington Post columnist Sally Blount describes this as a “pure mental accounting move, not actual substantive change.”1 In the face of this debate, many have argued that the only acceptable action by the Obama administration at this point would be to rescind the declaration altogether.

Much has been written in the past several weeks about the legal and moral issues involved. But among the most interesting aspects of the decision and the debate surrounding it is its phenomenal imprudence. Examining the nature and history of this imprudence draws us in to a greater understanding not only of this specific issue, but also of the nature of the modern state.

Just how imprudent is the decision? Well, many commentators even in the traditionally left-leaning parts of the media surprised the Obama administration with the vehemence of their objections to it. Chris Matthews, for example, called the rule “frightening;” the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama had “utterly botched” the issue. The New York Times claimed that, indeed, the “accommodation” decision by Obama was “never really driven by a desire to mollify Roman Catholic bishops,”2 and not in response to the conservative critiques, but rather in response to the objections of left-leaning Catholic supporters of the Obama administration’s health plan. It was the outrage of his allies, not that of his enemies, that changed Obama’s mind.

To make sense of all this, there are really two questions that have to be answered. First, what are the philosophical issues involved, how have they been presented in media coverage, and how has that coverage gotten them wrong? Second, how—how on earth—could Obama have misjudged the situation so badly, and what could have motivated him to take such a radical, imprudent, and (in the event) unpopular step—especially in an election year?

Answering the first question is a matter of philosophical and rhetorical analysis; answering the second will take a bit of digging into the ways that nation states have, in the past, felt drawn to assert themselves against alternate sources of authority, and against the Catholic Church in particular.

Journalism, Policy, and the Rhetorical Flight from Philosophy

One of the original Times articles reporting the initial mandate presented the clash as taking place between the “medical case for birth control,” on the one hand, and “deeply held religious and cultural belief” on the other.3 In other words, rather than portraying the contest as a philosophical one, taking place between two principles of social order (obedience to a legitimately constituted state versus obedience to the Church), or between two metaphysical statements (the embryo is or is not a human person), the contest is recast as one between “science” and “faith.”

This opposition is, for the worldview of the Times, rhetorical penicillin: good for what ails you. An expansive gesture towards natural science will always trump philosophy, which is of course not considered to be a science in its own right. Related to the appeal to natural science is an appeal to a naturalistic “social science,” which regards public policy as a philosophy-free zone. Sally Blount’s Washington Post column comes close to pinning this issue down when she looks at the tendency of most policymakers (and journalists) to “skirt the real thesis behind the Catholic and other churches’ stance on birth control. That is, the act of intercourse, because of its potential to create a new life, is quite special and should not be engaged in or treated lightly.”

This is an assertion about reality, and it is one which much public policy discussion simply refuses to address. Modern public policy does its absolute best to escape from metaphysics, and fantasizes that it can succeed at this attempt through sticking to utilitarian approaches. That is, it finds questions about the proper ends of society and human lives too difficult, and concentrates on the means by which undiscussed ends can be achieved. As Blount says, “[F]or now, the social policy arguments seem to be winning out, namely that reproductive freedom and the affordability thereof are critical to women’s health and to controlling overall health-care costs.”

It is of course only a fantasy that framing the question in this way, as policymakers want to do, does not contain ends-related metaphysical assumptions. Among these assumptions are that maximizing individual freedom of action is always a good (which many, both on the right and the anti-libertarian left might disagree with); that it is better for women to be healthy than to be sick (which few people of any stripe would disagree with); and that being pregnant constitutes sickness (an assumption embedded in this discourse that very few people would actually agree with, if it were presented to them baldly).

In discussions such as that surrounding Obama’s recent decision, the above metaphysical assertions are often dressed up in a sort of Halloween costume of philosophically neutral science; attempts to actually bring the philosophical issues to the foreground are labeled as publicly inadmissible faith-talk, and policymakers and journalists mouse on over to File>Save, feeling that they have been very tidy in their analysis. The origin of the effectiveness of this gesture lies in the eighteenth century triumph of positivism. Eric Voegelin’s analysis of the historical transition in which, under the glamor of Newtonian quantifiability, positivism swept the field of public discussion, is useful here. It was positivism, as Voegelin noted, that set up our familiar dichotomy between “value-judgments” and judgments about facts. This dichotomy was “created through the positivistic conceit that only propositions concerning facts of the phenomenal world were “objective,” while judgments concerning the right order of the soul and society were “subjective.” Only propositions of the first type could be considered “scientific,” while propositions of the second type expressed personal preferences and decisions, incapable of critical verification and therefore devoid of objective validity.”4 And so the Times sets up its opposition between the “medical case for birth control” and the “deeply held beliefs” of Catholics, and considers the matter settled.

But there is actually lurking in the question of birth control a fact of the phenomenal world which will make this decision by the Obama administration somewhat more explosive than the administration anticipated. It’s not, it turns out, just a “Catholic” issue—or rather, not just an issue for those who oppose contraception. The reason for this is that the contraceptives that are required to be covered by the insurance plans includes chemical contraceptives such as the birth control pill. Evangelicals generally accept contraception in principle, and many of them use the birth control pill. What most don’t know is that virtually all forms of chemical contraception have, as their third layer of protection against a live birth, an agent that is designed to act as an abortifacient. Generally the Pill operates to prevent conception, but it has, as a backup mechanism, the effect of thinning the uterine lining, discouraging implantation of the embryo should fertilization take place. Those who oppose abortion, even if they don’t reject contraception per se, should, therefore, be at least thoughtful about the decision to require any institution, Catholic or not, to pay for birth control that can have this effect.

Conscience Protections, the Clash of Loyalties, and the Fabric of Society

This blow against the consciences of those who would now be required to fund women’s access to birth control is neither an isolated attack nor an unprecedented one. When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was originally passed, commentators noted its lack of adequate conscience protections for healthcare workers. In an article in the August/September 2011 issue of First Things, Ryan T. Anderson wrote that “[W]hen the Senate was drafting the bill, it explicitly rejected the Weldon Amendment, long-accepted language that provides conscience protection for those opposed to abortion…. That the Senate refused to include this long-standing language should give pro-lifers pause.”5 Anderson calls his readers’ attention to what the lack of adequate conscience protections might mean “given an increased role for federally funded health care.” In the decision under discussion here, we are seeing another aspect of what the original inadequacy of conscience protections pointed towards.

So, what are some of the issues involved? What is the bind that some in leadership, human resources, and management positions in religious organizations will be finding themselves in? I am not going to focus on the philosophical or moral case against either birth control in general or abortifacient birth control in particular. These things are where the center of this issue lies; they are where the real battles of conscience and understanding take place; but they are covered extensively elsewhere. Rather, I’m going to focus on the impact on society that Obama’s decision, if he does not rescind it, is likely to have.

The primary impact from this perspective is, of course, the fact that the decision, with an almost experimental deliberateness, pits the loyalty of Catholics to the Church against their loyalty to the state. This is what much of the press coverage has focused on, and rightly so. If anything will tend to destroy the coherence of a society, it is the pitting of two institutions, both of which claim obedience and loyalty, against each other. It’s as though a law were passed that forced people to choose between taking care of their parents and taking care of their children, or between keeping their word to their friends and honoring the terms of a business contract. The law could scarcely be calculated to be more destructive; such destructiveness is obviously newsworthy.

It was, as the original Times article that covered it phrased it, a “politically charged” decision. One might think that such a political explosive is the kind of thing that a state might, in general, want to avoid. But in the case of states that are becoming deformed, hypertrophied, this kind of pushing of the envelope is in fact necessary to the logic of the deformation.

To see this more clearly, consider how a non-deformed state might conduct itself with regard to such hot-button issues. Generally, the course of wisdom would be for a state to be prudent in its demands on the loyalty of its citizens or subjects. A wisely governed state would go out of its way to avoid placing its people in a position where their loyalties to it are tested. An imperfect analogy is to the family: St. Paul enjoins fathers not to “exasperate” their children, as well as enjoining children to obey their parents. States should, in parallel, avoid making it difficult or impossible for their people to continue to behave with loyalty towards them. Prudence in politics is an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of human loyalties.

The prudent politician knows that to force some kind of showdown between a loyalty to the state and a loyalty to anything else will inevitably damage the filaments that bind society together. Such showdowns will even damage the state itself, ultimately, though they are designed to aggrandize it. This is because the state is meant to be one authority among many, just as the family is meant to be one authority among many. It distorts its own telos when it insists on an absolute loyalty that should be reserved only for God: it is like a beaver that refuses to build a dam and tries instead to build the Empire State Building. Not only will such an animal not do a good job (and the state has shown that it does not make a very good family, church, market, school, or god)—it won’t even have a particularly good time.

I don’t have any real interest in denouncing my country or even the current government. But I do think that it’s appropriate to try to look for the sources of the ideas that led the leaders of our government, half-consciously, to force the showdown that, by the ruling about birth control, they are precipitating.

It’s not as though there’s no tradition of limited government in America. We do have a set of ideas that acknowledge the limits that government should place on its own demands for loyalty. This liberal democratic tradition tends to focus on the fact that the government should not encroach on the freedom of choice of the individual. Those using its language talk in terms of rights, as did Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, when, speaking for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in response to Obama’s initial decision, she said that the Conference could not just “lie down and die and let religious freedom go.”

This tradition—the one that speaks in terms of religious freedom—was, however, originally erected on the scaffolding of an earlier tradition, and is (even as it distorts it) dependent on it. This undergirding points us to a slightly different analysis of the wrong done in a decision like Obama’s. This transgression of the limits on state power can be seen, in the older tradition, as infringing not only on individual rights, but on the claims of other institutions that justly, and simultaneously, demand our loyalty.

It’s not that the state should not command our loyalty. It should: the “powers that be are instituted of God,” as St. Paul said, and we court anarchy at our peril. But states that are straying from their telos show their hand when they undermine other institutions that we’re meant to obey: the family, the church, and so forth. Authority, when it is acting legitimately, supports other legitimate authority. When it’s acting illegitimately, it places its subjects into situations that are literally impossible, such that the same subject is torn apart as he hears multiple, irreconcilable calls to obedience. The same subject, you might say, suffers from an incompatibility of predicates.

It’s precisely this multiplicity of institutional claims on our loyalty that some modern theories of the state reject. Henry Sedgwick, whose 1891 Elements of Politics provided a major summary of a Utilitarian view of the state, wrote that “when we speak of the state, we can mean nothing else than an apparatus of government, empowered to command the exclusive allegiance of those living under it.” [my emphasis] This government cannot allow any competitors to its claims, and must constantly be measuring itself against them, trying to extinguish them in their roles as extra-governmental checks and balances to its own authority.

Kulturkampf and Nation-Building: The Experience of the Second Reich

We’ve seen the kind of showdown that the Obama administration is provoking. Representative of many modern states’ attempt to impose a single total institutional loyalty to themselves is the experience of Germany during the Second Reich. When, in the 1870s, Bismarck was engaged in forging Germany into a paradigm of the unitary national state, the institution that he felt was most threatening to his task was the Catholic Church. The phrase culture war—now so familiar to us in the context of things like the issue of abortion—is in fact a translation of the German kulturkampf, the word that the physician and public health crusader Rudolph Virchow coined to describe the struggle that Bismarck was carrying on against the Catholic Church.

This struggle was often, both at the time and in historical memory, framed in traditional Protestant anti-Catholic terms, but, as historian Michael B. Gross argues in his 2005 study The War Against Catholicism, this was a bit of a smokescreen. It was the authoritarian liberal nationalism of people like Virchow, dedicated to using the state as an instrument for the secularization of society, and not the more conservative cultural Protestantism of Bismarck himself, that was the real source of the anti-Catholic animus during the kulturkampf.

These liberal anti-Catholic beliefs had been gathering steam for some decades. Anti-Catholicism often first rears its head as anti-Jesuitism, and since the 1850s, Prussian authorities had been arguing more and more strongly that the existence of the order was a threat to the authority of the state. In December 1858, Cologne District Governor Möller wrote of the Jesuits that “it is desirable to be rid of them … their removal is gladly seen as altogether necessary by all sensible patriots” (ital. in original)6 Part of the problem, as people like Möller saw it, was that the Catholic Church was a drain on capital. People would give large bequests to the Church, and then the Church would irritatingly refuse to build factories with the money. These were the bequests to the “so-called dead hand—religious orders, monasteries, churches, hospitals, and orphanages administered by religious orders,” which Prussian bureaucrats regarded as nothing more than “sinkholes for otherwise productive capital.”7

Monasticism had been under tremendous suspicion in the decades leading up to the establishment of the Second Reich: an 1859 report to the Aachen Provincial Governor argued that “the vows of poverty, chastity, and unqualified obedience established … the abdication of all personal freedom and independence, impossible in a mere association.” In other words, those committed to monastic life could not be proper Kantian subjects, free in an absolute way to give or withhold consent. Although Prussia had laws mandating freedom of association, by 1860 most Prussian authorities did not believe that these laws applied to monastic orders in general and to the Jesuits in particular.8

This belief set the stage for the acceptance of the Kulturkampf laws that began to appear just after the establishment of the Second Reich under Prussian dominance in 1871. In the early 1870s, monks and nuns were forbidden from teaching in public schools and religious schools were commanded to be open to official government inspection; the education of Catholic clergy was put under the authority of the government and a special state court was set up to hear cases involving the clergy. Most stringently, in 1871, under the notorious Kanzelparagraph which was added to the criminal law code, priests who discussed politics from the pulpit were subject to sentence of up to two years in prison. During the worst period of the persecutions, half the bishops in Prussia were in exile or in prison; almost 2000 parish priests were imprisoned, along with thousands of laymen and women; and a quarter of Prussia’s parishes had no priest.

In 1848, during the failed nationalist revolution that whetted the Germans’ appetite for Bismarck’s later unification, a song written by a man called Hoffman von Fallersleben got adopted as a sort of ballad of German nationalism. During Bismarck’s era, it was picked up as the unofficial national anthem of the new Second Reich; in 1922 it was put on a more official footing. Its 20th century meaning was somewhat different from the meaning that it originally—in 1848 and 1870—possessed. The alles that Deutschland was originally supposed to be über were not the other nations of Europe. The Germans who sang the song during Bismarck’s time were not thinking about setting Germany over France, over Holland, over England. Rather, the song meant originally that Germany was over Bavaria, was over Prussia, was over the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches: was over all the alternate internal loyalties that its citizens had, for so many centuries, managed one way or another to negotiate into an amiable rapprochement.

Eventually, even the Protestant churches in Germany saw the danger of the kulturkampf, saw the true face of the militant secularism that disguised itself as more traditional Protestant anti-Catholicism. According to Gross, “Protestant leaders could agree that lack of Christian faith, rather than the power of Roman Catholicism…was the most serious threat to society…Religious leaders, Catholic and Protestant, argued at the same time that the churches must be left free from state regulations in order to attend to their respective evangelical responsibilities.”9

In his discussion of earlier treatments of the kulturkampf, Michael Gross notes that historians have tended to see it as an aberration, a betrayal of the central liberal ideal of universal rights, a “moment of liberal absentmindedness or acquiescence to Bismarckian manipulation during which liberals abandoned their cherished principles.”10 Gross, however, rejects this. “Modern liberal ideology,” he argues,

masks a deeply authoritarian strain that can be traced to the totalizing utopian project of the Enlightenment… the liberal hatred of Catholics that culminated in the Kulturkampf was too deep, too intense, to be simply a mistake… The Kulturkampf was not due to the liberals’ insufficient commitment to their own creed. Nor was it the case that German liberals were endowed with an inadequate Enlightenment legacy. On the contrary, the German liberals who were Kulturkampfer (culture warriors) against the Catholic Church and Catholicism were passionately dedicated to their ideals and incessantly referenced the Enlightenment for inspiration and orientation… The Kulturkampf emerges in this light not as an exception to liberal principles but as the culmination of liberal demands for a modern German political, economic, social, and sexual order. Anti-Catholic intolerance was not derivative but constitutive of liberalism; it was not an ancillary expression but, on the contrary, at the core of liberalism in Germany.11

Arguably, Christians in general are in a similar position in the present-day United States that Catholics were in Bismarck’s Germany. Both Catholics and Protestants acknowledge a primary loyalty to the Kingdom of God, which is a loyalty that must always stick in the craw of a totalizing state. Catholics first and most obviously, but Protestants soon enough, may feel a real pinch as the state begins to turn the screws on this loyalty.

We may be in a similar position—but we are not an identical one. The recent Supreme Court decision in favor of the “ministerial exception” that confirms religious institutions’ right to make their own decisions about hiring and firing is a hopeful sign, and one that militates against reading too close a parallel between the Bismarckian era and our own.

Despite this, however, it’s difficult to read the Obama administration’s decision to require Catholic institutions to fund birth control as anything other than a deliberate attempt to provoke a showdown of loyalties. Judging from history, there seems to be a kind of instinct on the part of states that are trying, as Bismarck was trying, to take a major step in the consolidation of national authority, to create test-cases, to force showdowns. This may simply be the tendency of anyone who has power to try to absolutize that power. Though the administration has stepped back from its original hard-line position, it may be that future showdowns are in the offing.

If they are, we cannot respond to this by despising the authority of the state. It would be wrong for us to be anarchists. It would be wrong to reject the authority of the state wholesale. What we must do is call the national state back to itself: to try to preserve the independence of alternate institutions both for their own sake, and for the sake of the state. When one source of authority attacks all others, it will eventually end in its own destruction, as a cancer destroys its host. If we reject anarchy, we must strengthen alternate sources of authority, bring social institutions back into some kind of balance, so that the people who live among them and whose fulfillment is found partly in them (we are, after all, political animals) are not tormented by conflicting calls of loyalty. We’ve got to pray for our national leaders. And we’ve got to pray that we ourselves aren’t brought to the time of trial.

Susannah Black
Susannah Black is a freelance writer, specializing in content for the educational publishing market. She received a BA in English from Amherst College and an MA in Early Modern English History from Boston University. Born and raised in Manhattan, she is now taking her stand in central Queens.

28 Comments

Me too! Part of it is the lack of erudition of our Bishops, part of it is them not wanting to be too “controversial”, part of it is really spinelessness. I’ve been Catholic for 16 years, I majored in Theology, I’ve studied scholastic theology and philosophy in Latin for 5+ years, and I still can’t explain it, except in the following dialectic: the hierarchy, as in the renaissance, is blind to the real issues of the day. As far as the claims of the Catholic Church go, which deal primarily with issues of faith and salvation, our Lord never promised our Bishops would always get it. He only promised the work of the Church to save souls would continue, and it has. When Napoleon told Cardinal Consalvi that he would destroy the Catholic Church, Consalvi laughed and said “You can’t do that, even we haven’t been able to do that!” This should be humbling from one of the greatest papal secretaries of state of all time, as a reminder that the men in the Church are still human. Thus, the Bishops, not only in America, but throughout the world, do not understand the monetary or economic issues. They attack poverty, correctly, but they don’t understand why there is poverty, so they resort to platitudes while investing diocesan money into Wall Street. I can only echo your words, it makes you want to pull your hair out. I’m glad the Bishops are finally stepping up to the plate, but its too little too late in my view, they just don’t get it. But Christ never promised they would.

So, like Mr. Cooney said, don’t leave, just agree to disagree. I listen to a variety of media, most of which I disagree with on religious questions, and whenever I say that’s it, I won’t listen to him again, I end up waffling and coming back. Now, truly, I think you’re right, where have the American Bishops been on the disintegration of the family, of our local economies, of our rights? Frankly nowhere. Now all of the sudden they jump into action over the contraception mandate. Now they cloak themselves in religious liberty, while ignoring what truly gives freedom, the right to manage the production of capital into wealth and control the destiny of our own families. Too little, too late. Sadly, such is life. So in sum, you’re right, all of the sudden we go nuts over the HHS mandate. It is endemic of the overall problem, yet it is not an insignificant part. I would just take it for what it is and hope it garners more people into questioning the power of the state over our true liberties, our right to productive capital.

I am not an expert in Catholic theology by any means. However, I believe that the Pope has repeatedly condemned capitalism for its avarice and effects on the world’s poor. Yet I don’t see a major swell of outrage by Catholic leaders about Wall Street’s abuses, or a protest about the necessity that I, as a state employee, am required to invest my money in a retirement fund that contributes to a system with which I disagree. No, we end up getting exercised about sex. It makes me want to pull my hair out.

I’ve stayed out of conversation on this article, though it is good, because I think the conversation surrounding it has kind of missed the point and gone slightly astray from the more salient points of the main argument.
That being said I have to interject, someone living in the Papal States prior to Napoleon would have noticed no difference to how the rest of European Society was ruled, and certainly a great improvement over how most Islamic societies were ruled. That is not to put it forth as a model of earthly perfection, rather to point out that the Popes in the late Middle Ages turned the papacy into an Italian principate. After Napoleon, when a conservative clerical organization took over the papal states actually ran better than it had for centuries, except that it was in the back drop of lay control for 15 years and the Napoleonic code that had alienated powerful factions, which eventually joined up with Mezzini.
Now one can debate whether the temporal sovereignty as a whole was a good or a bad thing, but let’s not kid ourselves, given the standards of the day it was not so bad in the Renaissance. Viewed by what we expect the Church then yes it was not good, and I won’t defend it. Yet we do not discover history by judging by the lens of the present, but by examining according to the norms of the time. A lot of the great art and music if the late middle ages was paid for by the Pope.

Moreover, the question of theocratic government is irrelevant to the question of Catholic social teaching and the attempt of the state to force the Church to do something contrary to God. This issue is in fact a social issue, and an economic issue at the same time. cui bono? Powerful non-governmental organizations like Planned Parenthood for one, insurance companies two, Wall Street three which publicly trades on insurance stocks. Let’s say one is not Catholic, why should this issue worry them? Because the state is now going to say you must pay for things your religion teaches are wrong. You may believe the Church is wrong, all fine and good. What do you think would happen if the state required Muslims to eat pork because it is healthy for you? What if it required Jews to eat shellfish because the state determined it was good for their health? Outside of the Catholic social tradition this issue should be worrying, if for no other reason that the state is determining what religion both as a corporate entity and individuals ought to do.

Mr. Campbell, it really must be pointed out, have we not had more than a thousand years’ experience of truly “Catholic” governance in the form of the Papal States? Is that really your ideal of government? If it is not your ideal, why not? What more could you want than to be living in the Campagna in the 14th century, where you would have the grace to be under the direct rule of the pope? And if you do want to live that way, I recommend reading Gregorovius to have a good sense of what it might have entailed. To my mind you have to be ignorant of both history and the mission of Jesus – who could not have been any clearer on this point – and the early apostles, none of whom aspired to Mohammedan or Joseph-Smithian dominion – to really embrace this stato-Catholicism. Really, must we recapitulate ALL the mistakes of the Middle Ages?

And Scott, yes, in general religion has a way of making itself seem less than desirable. In the parable it is the one who cavorts with the prostitutes who is thrown a party, while the only person who does not attend the feast is his brother, who has done everything right his whole life.

Mr. Walters,
Sorry to see you go, but I hope you’ll reconsider. For the record, the issue as brought up in the article isn’t about religious freedom, it isn’t about the money, it isn’t about the existence of contraception, it isn’t about the fact that many people use it, and it isn’t about paying for it.
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The issue, as the article makes clear, is about the state claiming the power to force people to directly purchase a service to which they have moral and religious objections. I’m sorry if the direction of the conversation obscured that fact.
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While the majority of our articles are about approaches to the economy – even those which focus on explain Church teaching on economic matters – the fact is that Distributism has always included more than just economics as you, having read Schumacher, Chesterton, and Belloc, should know. One of the other issues that Distributism has always included is the idea of subsidiarity to determine the appropriate roles of different levels of society including its government. That is what has been discussed here.
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We understand that there will be those who will reject Distributism because of its definite ties to the teachings of the Catholic Church (http://swanky-foot.flywheelsites.com/2011/05/is-distributism-catholic/). If that is your choice, then good luck with your own movement.

Yeeeaaahhhh…. I’m outa here. I thought I might be a distributist because I read some Schumacher, Chesterton, and Bellac, but clearly this journal is more about Catholic social issues than an approach to the economy.

This issue isn’t about “religious freedom.” It is about money. The big objection is not to the existence of contraception, or the fact that many people use it. No, the objection is to paying for it, as if somehow it besmirches the purity of money. And it is that focus on money that is so disappointing to encounter here. I guess I’ll just keep reading Schumacher and think about creating a ruralist movement that focuses on the value of small scale lifestyles without being a parrot for the Vatican.

Yet another example of why we need to flee-and not cheer-liberal American style democracy and work with all our might, with our various talents and skills, for a truly Catholic State…..this is the natural outcome of value-free Republics, where man is left to himself to govern himself…..Monarcy, Elected legislatures-whatever, must be truly Catholic

Ron,
The only problem with your point is that it really avoids the basic issue brought up by the article. The state cannot demand absolute loyalty because there are other entities which could also make that claim (and I think God has a better claim than the US government).
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The solution is to realize that this is not about health care – no matter how hard those who want us to capitulate want to argue that it is. After that, we need to implement subsidiarity, so that the state does not overstep its bounds and cannot become totalitarian as ours is increasingly in danger of becoming. By localizing authority and institutions, and by making better changes to the method of securing health care than has been proposed by our federal behemoth, you wouldn’t have to worry about your Muslim employer refusing to have a policy that will pay for a heart valve from a pig to replace your failing one.http://swanky-foot.flywheelsites.com/2010/09/distributism-and-health-care-reform-i/

“Ron– All I’m gonna say is this: a welding education nonprofit magnate/cult leader is not going to make a good boss, whether or not you have cancer. Just an observation.”
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Cute! I just keep trying to move the story away from the Roman Catholic Church. Not because it has more/fewer rights to limit its businesses in accordance with its dictates, but because it doesn’t. Laws passed for/against the Roman Catholic Church are also passed for Church of Ralph, and for the Buddhists, and the Muslims.
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If I need a pig valve in my heart, can my Muslim boss refuse to pay for it? How many people at what rank in the company get to decide that?
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The real root of the problem is that organisations aren’t people. They don’t have consciences, they have policies.
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Very few organisations are as monolithic as the Roman Catholic Church in decision-making. Do I have to wait for my valve while my Muslim boss and her Jewish boss argue it out with the atheist owner? Or all the members of the board? All the shareholders?
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I just can’t imagine a law whereby “legitimate” churches fortunate enough to speak with a single voice on matters of conscience can be given this religious freedom, without establishing some government-approved official churches. Very, very dangerous — because mine might not be among them.

Mr. Kuhner,
I think it’s pretty clear that we will not come to an agreement here. I would simply point out that no one is claiming that the government is forcing people to *use* contraception. I don’t think you’ll find that in any of the statements in opposition to this policy. Therefore, that fact has nothing to do with the issue and offers nothing against the complaints being made.
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I believe there is an important, if subtle, difference between the government collecting money through taxation and then using it for something we personally oppose, and the government ordering us to directly spend money on that same thing. When faced with the question of paying a tax, Christ said to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. However, I don’t believe He also said it was therefore okay for His followers to personally donate to the pagan temples of the Roman gods. The question at hand is whether or not our government should have that ability.
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As far as the government requiring service in the military, the historic (and current) position of our government it to allow for conscientious objection to that service – and it doesn’t even require a religious basis. That whole point, however, is disarmed in terms of Christian history (by which I mean Catholic history) because, while the Church has always sought to bring an end to war, it admits the possibility of a just war and has historically accepted the requirement of service for a just war. The Church, however, does not admit any just cause for using contraceptives to avoid pregnancy.
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Government mandated universal health care is not a Christian goal, especially when the means of establishing it violates the historic Christian principle of subsidiarity. There are many ways to address the right to access health care that would likely be far more effective than the legislation passed by our federal government. I’m sorry, but Christians cannot simply set aside one part of their faith for another, and we can never condone what has for twenty centuries been condemned as evil on the hope that it will achieve a different good end.

Mr. Cooney,
My general comments were in response to your general comments: that this is an example of totalitarian authority, and that the government cannot require people to make purchases (though it can require government service). That refers to health care in general, not to the contraception mandate in particular. I think the health care mandate is well within the power of a government which can require something far more invasive such as military service. In addition, as I commented, this health care mandate creates the possibility of achieving a Christian goal which, given the political realities of our country, would be difficult to achieve by other means (and in the short term would not be achieved).
But on the contraception mandate in particular: I still do not see that anyone is required to use birth control, which means that their freedom as moral agents is maintained. On the specifics of contraceptives not being medicines, my own health insurance plan covers a number of things which are not medicines and not designed to prevent any illness – my plan covers gym memberships, for instance. The reason for this is that health is far broader a concept than mere disease. I doubt you would object to gym memberships being offered, though they are not medicines nor medical care. Health insurance companies do this because these steps seem to pay for themselves: it’s cheaper to offer gym memberships than pay for the consequences of a sedentary physique later. As I understand it, contraceptives in this system are being offered for free because they pay for themselves as well. I don’t have the actuarial data, but they might pay for themselves merely vis-a-vis the cost of pregnancy tests, which women might otherwise be using before drinking; I think contraceptives also increase the frequency of sexual intercourse, which also is correlated to better health. Again, this does not mean that anyone has to use them. But it also eliminates the idea that conscientious objectors are supporting this program financially.

Great conversation, guys– let me throw in a couple of ideas/clarifications.

John– As David says, I do think that the mandate puts employers who will be paying for it, in one way or another, in a different position than taxpayers would be if we had universal health care. Actually, Scott Galupo (who rocks and you should all read him) has an article here http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/scott-galupo/2012/02/16/why-the-catholic-contraception-controversy-is-so-american that talks about how basically it’s our piecemeal approach to nationalized health care that’s led to these debates. I don’t want to go into the question of whether tax resistance would be right, because I don’t know what I think about that, yet. But I do think that this is not the same scenario as a tax-resistance question would be.

Scott– Oy– well, yes, there is a less Catholic-conservative version of Distributism– check out EF Schumacher. But listen, I totally think you misread me. I’m an Evangelical. I very much don’t want to bash the Reformation, and I ESPECIALLY don’t want to say anything in my writing that would increase the antagonism between different parts of this family. REALLY don’t want to do that. As for other cultures…google srenis. These were fantastically cool guilds in India, lasted through the 1400s or so, and embodied a lot of distributist ideas. They even included members from different castes, and were one of the few institutions that promoted this kind of inter-caste solidarity. Not sure if Gandhi’s idea of swaraj explicitly drew from that tradition, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

David– Good on the “employers are also individuals” point; I address it more below. But I’d personally shy away from calling our gov’t totalitarian. That’s way overstating it. It’s more that Obama, being the president, is dealing with a very strong nation-state meme, and that meme wants to centralize.

Ron– All I’m gonna say is this: a welding education nonprofit magnate/cult leader is not going to make a good boss, whether or not you have cancer. Just an observation.

One thing that interests me in all this is the degree to which thinking about politics is thinking in stories. As you read pieces about HHS, you start to get the sense that the identity of the protagonist of the story you are telling is going to influence where you come down on the issue. Is HHS a story about an employee who is not being treated equitably because she works for a Catholic university and does not have access to the same insurance coverage for birth control pills as someone else who works somewhere else? Or is HHS a story about an administrator in an HR department in a Catholic university who is suddenly being told that if she doesn’t put her signature on this particular form, she will be defying the federal government, but if she does, she’ll be personally authorizing the financing of what she regards as a sin?

I think I can see these two different stories even in the comments here– Ron talks in terms of individuals/citizens, who are his rights-bearing protagonists, and contrasts them with employers/institutions, who are not protagonists and do not have rights, while David’s protagonists are his “private individuals and employers,” a single category of rights-bearing people.

I obviously had the latter story in my mind when I wrote the article. And I think that it’s that kind of story that the founding-era freedom of religion discourse was based on. Freedom of religion was originally conceived as freedom from having to pay the wages of pastors in an established church who you believed were preaching heresy. It was a conscience protection, to prevent people from having to either sear their consciences or disobey the law. That’s what we’ve got here, I think.

Ron,
You wrote, “I think that the individuals who choose to submit to a church’s discipline, whether Buddhist, Jehovah’s Witness, or Roman Catholic, has the civil right to do so, or not. Employers are another matter altogether, and fall under the government’s auspices.”
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The problem I have with this is that employers are also individuals. Therefore, forcing employers to do this is no different than forcing individuals. We do not deny that government has the right to set certain standards, we do challenge what level of government has that right and the extent to which a government that claims to be neutral to religion, and has historically made allowances for differences caused by faith, can now completely disregard it. You seem to be saying that the government’s increasing grab for more and more and more centralized authority over every aspect in our lives is “not an issue” if it does so through the employer. I’m sorry, that just doesn’t hold up.
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The government is not addressing a health issue. As I pointed out above, pregnancy is not an illness and the Church already gives approval for use of things like the pill when necessary to address certain actual illnesses. Therefore, there was no need to come up with this mandate to address any actual health issue – it was a non-issue.
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1 Cor 7:5 does not, in any way, justify contraception – at least, not for Catholics who are to look to the magesterium for a proper understanding of Scripture in light of the faith as a whole. What it says is that couples can mutually consent to not have sex for a period of time. The magisterium’s interpretation of this has never been approval of contraception, and the vehement condemnations of contraception by the Early Church confirm this. In the context of Natural Family Planning, Catholic classes on using the Sympto-Thermal method do (or should) include instruction of using this time for prayerful reflection on the reasons the couple are seeking to delay having a child, and the requirement to accept one if they do end up getting pregnancy.

Mr. Walters,
With all due respect, the issue is not that “our version” of Distributism is focused on birth control, the issue is the increasing totalitarian power of the highest level of government. That is certainly an issue for anyone who favors Distributism. The article did not bash the Reformation or non-Catholic or non-Western European thought. In fact, the article specifically pointed out that the attempt to frame Bismark’s actions as a Protestant versus Catholic issue is a smokescreen. This site has pointed out that distributist principles can be found in other religions and cultures.

Repost with David’s virtual white space added.
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@Jess, your point is well made, and I did think about it. I didn’t address it because reading online is so stinking difficult! I try to put at most three ideas in a post. So, to address it now:
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I should also point out that sometimes (not often, now) contraception may a necessity if we are to take 1 Cor 7:5 at face value.
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However, whether a given medical procedure is for saving life, or purely cosmetic, the principle is the same from the civil viewpoint: the U.S. government is setting standards for employer medical coverage. My point was that, unless the government also establishes official versions of religions, they can’t write the insurance requirements around them.
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I think that the individuals who choose to submit to a church’s discipline, whether Buddhist, Jehovah’s Witness, or Roman Catholic, has the civil right to do so, or not. Employers are another matter altogether, and fall under the government’s auspices.
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I don’t much like it that our employers are, for no apparent reason, responsible for our health care, but that’s not the issue here. Since they are, then they should be regulated as employers, regardless of the religious beliefs of the owners/shareholders/founders of the company.

@Jess, your point is well made, and I did think about it. I didn’t address it because reading online is so stinking difficult! I try to put at most three ideas in a post. So, to address it now:

I should also point out that sometimes (not often, now) contraception may a necessity if we are to take 1 Cor 7:5 at face value.

However, whether a given medical procedure is for saving life, or purely cosmetic, the principle is the same from the civil viewpoint: the U.S. government is setting standards for employer medical coverage. My point was that, unless the government also establishes official versions of religions, they can’t write the insurance requirements around them.

I think that the individuals who choose to submit to a church’s discipline, whether Buddhist, Jehovah’s Witness, or Roman Catholic, has the civil right to do so, or not. Employers are another matter altogether, and fall under the government’s auspices.

I don’t much like it that our employers are, for no apparent reason, responsible for our health care, but that’s not the issue here. Since they are, then they should be regulated as employers, regardless of the religious beliefs of the owners/shareholders/founders of the company.

Mr. Kuhner,
Your statements seem, to me, to indicate that there is never any such thing as a just war which Christians could support, or that Christianity somehow precludes service (voluntary or not) in the military. That is news to me. We are to listen to the Church’s guidance in these matters, but the Church herself teaches that it is the head of state who determines when reasonable efforts to avoid war have been exhausted and that dreadful action is needed.
I am not making an argument in favor of any particular war campaign, I am discussing general principles in the same way you were.
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The Church does not have any objection to efforts to improve access to doctors and pharmeceuticals to prevent illness, but pregnancy is not an illness and that is not what the administration’s mandate is about. After all, the Church already approves of limited use of the pill in those cases where it is used to treat a specific illness and it is the best or only medicine. Since that is the case, there was no need for a mandate, so why was it made?
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I believe it was made as a test of the current level of the state’s totalitarian power over us. It may not be an infringement on religious freedom to provide access to contraception, but it is an infringement to require those who wish to follow the teachings of their faith to participate and directly pay for it even if they choose not to use it.
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I notice that you are attempting to alter the discussion from a specific mandate regarding abortifacients and contraceptives into one of general access to health care. Sorry, that won’t work. However, having the highest level of government force individual decisions in regard to health care is morally repugnant because it violates the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity.http://swanky-foot.flywheelsites.com/2010/09/distributism-and-health-care-reform-i/
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My example of the martyrs is because, although we are not yet threatened with martyrdom, we are being given essentially the same ultimatum – deny part of your faith or else. I did not claim that we have “no” religious freedom. I maintain that our religious freedom is being reduced in a very significant way. To the extent that people who reject contraception on religious grounds are forced to directly support or provide coverage for it, religious freedom is indeed infringed in Massachusetts.
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There are several ways in which you attempted to re-frame the issue in an illegitimate way in your last post and tried to make it something other, something more general, than what it actually is. Maybe your inability to see the specifics of the actual ojbection is the reason you fail to see why we object.

Mr. Cooney,
Thank you for the thorough and civic response. I still believe this is a strange place for Catholics to make a stand. It is true that the requirement to have medical coverage is different from a tax. But it is not nearly so invasive as the draft, nor is universal health insurance as morally repugnant to Christian belief as forced support, with or without arms, of a war effort. And yet we generally believe we are not denying our faith by living in a society that requires all its (male) citizens to register for selective service.
The principle is that our society will guarantee access to doctors and pharmaceuticals as part of a universal standard of living for all citizens, even the least of us. This strikes me as morally laudable and utterly compatible with Christianity. The largest change that will result from this program is the inclusion of lower-middle-class families in our health care system. Once they are in the door, then as individuals, yes, of course they may use their freedom in ways that are contrary to Catholic teaching – that is what makes them moral agents. Those moral decisions are entirely their own, however, and hardly infringe on our religious freedom. Our desire is merely to let them in the door. Do people really believe that Massachusetts currently does not have religious freedom? It has state-mandated birth control coverage. Do people really believe that Catholics there are all “denying their faith”? You give the example of the martyrs – again, no one is being required to use birth control.

As someone who supports the economic concepts of Distributism, and the superiority of a more rural lifestyle, I find myself in a quandary, because I find articles like this one so objectionable that I have a hard time focusing on the economic issues. Far be it from me to suggest that you change anything. However, I have a question as to whether there is a version of Distributism that is less concerned with birth control, bashing the Reformation, and casting aspersions on non-Catholic and non-European beliefs.

This may be off-topic, if the gist of the article concerns relations between the Roman Catholic Church and its members. As far as the Roman Catholic Church’s relations with people who are members, I have nothing to say. As far as the Roman Catholic Church’s authority over its churches, monasteries, convents, etc. — that’s also between them and the citizens who choose to submit to that church’s authority.

However, I’m very concerned that there is apparently some idea that the religious freedom of an institution could trump the religious freedom of a citizen under the Bill of Rights.

There is no precedent for this, is there? Religious institutions derive their liberties from the individual’s in the Bill of Rights.

Should insurance provided by businesses owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to pay for blood transfusions?

If there is a schism about an insurable procedure in the religious institution that operates my employer, does the government have to decide which faction is the “true church of (whatever)” so that they know what insurance is “requirable?” (Not all churches have as clearly-defined a central authority to ask as the Roman Catholics do!)

If I work for Ralph’s non-profit TeechUrSelfWelding, and I get cancer, then all Ralph has to do is sell out to the Church of Ralph, which doesn’t hold with cancer treatment, and bingo, I’m on my own?

If I go to work for any church-owned non-profit, then do I have to make sure that their beliefs (not mine, theirs!)will allow them to pay for an organ transplant, just on the off-chance?

Our institutions’ freedom of religion derives from the citizen’s freedom of religion. I’m not sure it is even possible to define it the other way around without creating an absolute nightmare of entanglement between religion and government. I’m not sure we can let institution’s beliefs trump individuals’ beliefs and still call it a freedom.

Mr. Kuhner,
I’m afraid that you have not been paying much attention to the actual issue at hand in this case. Yes, it is true that we cannot control every use of our tax dollars, and that some of those dollars will be used for things which we find morally objectionable, but that is not what is going on in this case. Forcing private individuals and employers to make a purchase is not a tax. I know that this is what the administration is claiming in court (although they deny it to the public), but it simply isn’t.
This is not tax money being collected by the government to be dispensed later as it sees fit. This is the government directing citizens to make specific market purchases and forcing businesses to sell a particular product.
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Catholic employers who self-insure must provide – at their own expense – full coverage for abortifacients and contraceptives.
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Catholic employers who do not self-insure must offer policies that provide full coverage of abortifacients and contraceptives. While the claim is that the insurance companies will cover the costs, we all know that it isn’t true. Those costs will be passed along and bundled in the employer’s costs.
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Catholic individuals must purchase insurance which provides full coverage for abortifacients and contraceptives.
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If you do not see the significance of this change, the significance the outright refusal to allow the usual religious exemptions has for all people of faith (not just Catholics), then you will be taken by surprise when the government forces you to choose between its totalitarian dominance over you and your freedom.
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As far as contraceptives demonstrably reducing abortion, you can’t be serious. The abortion rate has skyrocketed since contraception became available. Don’t be fooled into believing that the slight reduction in the number of abortions in recent years is due to contraception. It simply isn’t true. Even if it were true, it has always been a teaching of the Church that one may not deliberately commit evil even if the intention is to have a good result. This issue is not that the bishops “don’t like” contraception. It is that contraception has been condemned as sin ever since the Church’s foundation 2,000 years ago. All Christian churches taught against it until 1930.
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I’m sorry, but your argument that we should ignore the issue of contraception because it (supposedly) reduces abortion is like saying we should ignore adultery on the ground that it will reduce rape. Sorry, both are wrong, and the bishops must always stand against both.
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Traditional Christian theology exhorts us to be cooperative with our governments, but not to the extent of denying even one part of our faith. The early Christians did not have to be martyred. All they had to do was publicly acknowledge the Roman gods along with their own, and the Romans would have left them alone. This is essentially the choice with which Catholics today (and other faiths tomorrow) are faced. Are we willing to deny our faith because the state demands it? I pray that the answer will always be no.

It seems hard for me to believe that there is any actual intellectual content to this “showdown.” The bishops did not preach revolt when the states required contraception to be included in health insurance – only when Obama did. I have not heard any Catholic philosophers really claim that a person who does not use birth control is still guilty of using it if his tax money is used toward it. Our government engages in all kinds of activities which I do not condone, and it uses my money for it. There has never yet been any government – including the papal states and any number of theocratic Christian polities – which has governed according to Christian principles. And yet traditional Christian theology exhorts us to be cooperative with our governments. The bishops may not like contraception, but broad access to birth control is demonstrably tied to a reduction in the abortion rate, which is a worthy goal. I can’t understand why they are choosing to fight over this one.

Peet,
I’m afraid I don’t see your point. Is it that government intrusion into the exercise of religion – or its demand for complete obedience to it over our faith – is okay if some of the faithful don’t follow the teachings of their faith? The percentage of Catholics who believe the Church is correct on this teaching is larger than the percentage of Americans who thinks the Obama administration is correct on this dictate.
Maybe the log you think you see in Susannah’s is actually in your own.

All the Bishops have to do is instruct their faithful not to use birth control. And, since everybody is perfectly obedient, even if birth control were available, no one would use it. Easy. Or is that a log I see in your eye?

I, like the author, would like to be hopeful about this “showdown”, as she calls it, thinking as she does that it is a mistake on the governemnt’s part to draw this line in the sand. But I’m not so sure that I can. What I fear is that the same thing that happened to Catholicism in Britain under the reign of the Cecils will happen here. When push came to shove in those days, Catholics started to go with the flow, rather than stick to their Catholic guns, and that is why England was lost to the Faith.

Additionally, Catholics have been spiritually starved in recent decades, not only by the liberalism that has engulfed the Church in the wake of the disastrous Second Vatican Council, but for two centuries before that, at least in this country. American Catholics and their leaders have been since the nation’s founding in the 18th century trying to prove that they were good Americans first, and Catholics second. That tragic belief – which has not abated one bit today – was condemned by Pope Leo XIII as “Americanism”. This heresy – for that is what it is – has had a horrible effect upon not only the Church in America but the Church in many other countries. Americanism and liberalism, two pieces of the same pie, have got us to where we are today and I fear that this mindset will kick in as soon as the government decides to put the boot down. And the government is not stupid: they know the sorry state of Catholicism today, especially in liturgy and dogma and like a drooling jackal surrounding a wounded lion is ready to pounce for the kill.

Will we go the way of 16th century England? The way things look now I would say that is a definite possibility. I just don’t see the Bishops rejecting Americanism any time soon; it has been an ingrained idea for far too long. Please God I am wrong.

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